Due to the release of David Noonan's track converters and original tracks by David and the GPLEA, we now have approximately fifty tracks available for GPL. Given seven chassis and three classes, a complete collection would contain over a thousand setups!
Doing collections of setups for each F1 car which handle reasonably consistently at each of the original eleven tracks was a very big task. There's no way I can attempt to release complete collections for all tracks for even one of the chassis, never mind seven times three.
Besides, my setup philosophy keeps changing as I learn new things. Trying to create a complete, consistent collection has always been chasing a moving target. Even with only eleven tracks, I learned new things by the time I got to the last track, and I almost always had to go back and rework the setups I'd created earlier in the development phase to make them consistent with the latest ones.
With fifty tracks, the task becomes mind-boggling.
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GRE radically changed the way I do setup development, because I can quickly look at several setups and compare them to each other. For example, often I look at:
Using GRE to display several setups at the same time, I can quickly brew up a refined new setup based on all these existing setups.
In addition, writing GRE Help greatly deepened my understanding of setup behavior. While writing GRE Help, I learned how true is the old adage about teaching being the best way to learn!
Since I started using GRE, I almost never use the same setup twice. Each time I go to a setup with a given car, if there's an existing setup, I further refine it to match my current setup practices and my current driving style.
The sheer volume of tracks and chassis, coupled with my constantly evolving setup philosophy, makes it impossible for me to release complete, polished, coherent setup collections for all tracks, as I did for five chassis at the original GPL tracks (below).
As I said above, I hope that many GPL fans will use GRE and GRE Help and will learn how to develop their own setups. However, I realize that not everyone has the time or inclination to do this. Also, some people may benefit from having an existing setup as a starting point.
Therefore I've decided to put together collections of my most recent development setups for each chassis at each track.
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You can download these zipped X-File setup folders here:
Note that these collections include setups which were created over a wide span of time. Look inside the zips and you'll see that file creation dates vary wildly. My setup philosophy is constantly evolving, so don't expect all these setups to feel or handle the same!
Because these setups were collected using an automated process, the file names are not as consistent as they were in my original collections. See Setup File Notes for more information.
GPL saves your setups in a folder called "setups", which is right below your GPL player's folder.
For maximum convenience, these setup archives are intended to unzip directly into your GPL player's folder (not the setups folder under it).
For example, if your name is Juan Montoya, and you installed GPL in the default location, you would unzip the F1 setups into:
C:\SIERRA\gpl\players\Montoya__Juan
WinZip will automatically place each setup in its appropriate track folder inside the setups folder under your player's folder.
If you have another player called "Juan Montoya F2" for the Advanced Trainers (see the FAQ for information about why you'd want to do this), you'll unzip the F2 setups into:
C:\SIERRA\gpl\players\Montoya_F2__Juan
See the sidebar for more notes about unzipping the zip archives. If you don't have WinZip, download the free evaluation version.
Some setups in the X-Files archives date from late 1998 and early 1999. This isn't a mistake; in these cases, that's the most recent time I've done any setup work for that chassis and class at that particular track.
The setup files in these zip archives generally follow the file naming convention explained in GRE Help under Developing a Setup - Methodology.
Most of the setups have a suffix beginning with "x", which indicates that the setup is a development, or "experimental" setup. Hence the nickname, the "X-Files".
Note, however, some of the file suffixes may have a different prefix, such as "y" rather than "x", or may have no prefix at all. This isn't really significant; the date of the setup file is the most reliable indicator of the point at which it resides in the evolution of my setup philosophy.
Also, some folders will contain a setup from a different track instead of that track. This means I didn't create a setup for that track yet, but just copied in a setup from another track so I had something run there while testing that track.
Finally, a few setup files may have a name that simply isn't right. Sorry about that!